Different Strokes
by Mello-Drama-Reborn
Summary: Simply a description of Haruka, Makoto, and Rei swimming their preferred strokes (using the author's knowledge as a swimmer). Nagisa will not be appearing because the author can't breaststroke to save her life.
1. Freestyle

Haruka hardly made a sound as he dived into the pool, his hands cutting the water's surface like a blade. The water felt cool, yet alive on Haruka's skin; he could faintly feel it sliding past him as he moved, and he was almost reminded of flight.  
As his initial submerged dolphin kicks began to lose their power and he began to run out of air, Haruka brought up his arm, and finally his first real stroke brought him back to the surface.

Haruka was doing one of his favorite warm-up drills, one where he made no sound and didn't splash. Instead, he slid his arms in and out of the water to a constant, relaxing rhythm; his whole body rotating slightly with his arms, so it almost felt like a dance. With each powerful stoke, Haruka felt a small boost that his legs didn't give with their constant kicking, and these regular boosts felt like the bobbing of the ocean to him, even if he was in a still and silent pool.

As he brought his arm back, he brought his face up with it, sliding to the side to steal a breath before submerging in the water as his arm came over. Haruka liked to look into the water; to see the light dance under it's surface, to see his own shaky reflection float across the bottom of the pool, and to watch the different lines painted on the pool's floor rush past him, making him feel much faster than he was actually moving.

Haruka increased his speed, still not letting himself lose control of his clean, controlled strokes, but now the dance was faster, the bursts of speed the constant, the markings on the floor rushing by. His gentle calm began to be replaced by exhilaration, and even with his face submerged he felt himself smile. He made his last strokes long and powerful, the last just touching the edge of the wall without every extra kicks.  
He pulled himself up from the wall, whipping his hair out of his face as he took a big breath that might as well have been a sigh. After his swim, he felt calm, happy, and alive.


	2. Backstroke

Makoto looked lovingly at Haruka as he raised himself from the pool with movements that almost radiated laughter. He could hardly take his eyes off of him while he had been swimming, even if it was a simple drill. Now that he was done though, Makoto lowered himself into the pool, bracing himself against the wall before plunging in backwards in the more modest backstroke start.

His time under the water was brief, as he inevitably floated to the surface before he reached anywhere close to the distances the others went. Soon his arms were in the air, one rotating under him as the other towered above his face.  
While the backstroke was much like Freestyle, only on his back, there were a lot of things that, to Makoto, gave it a different light. It was far easier to breathe with his face staying above the water, but he also got a view he'd learned to appreciate. He was swimming at an easy pace, and he could leisurely watch his arms move past his face, leaving a trail of droplets that he needed to watch to avoid breathing them in. Past his arms, the high ceiling endlessly moved past him, the regular square tiles rolling onward as long as the pool and beyond, and when he was doing cool-down he sometimes thought to count them, only to be scolded for losing his concentration.

Even at his easy pace, it seemed like the flags hanging over the pool came into view quite quickly, signaling that he was nearing the edge of the pool. The flags were placed fifteen feet from the edge, and he had long figured out how many strokes he could make before hitting the wall. Strengthening his strokes to his consistent pace, he silently started counting in his head. 1... 2... 3...  
As he finished his last stroke, he quickly turned onto his stomach just in time to give him a starting stroke in freestyle before rolling into a tight flip turn, making sure not to roll back onto his stomach again as any other stoke would have him do.

After yet another short round of dolphin kicks, Makoto found himself on the surface of the water again, and he took advantage of his stroke's unique position to take a luxurious sigh.  
At times like this, he almost understood Haruka's love of water, and he wistfully wondered how long it'd be before he once again saw the warning flags warning him that his swim was ending.


	3. Butterfly

Nagisa looked excitedly from the edge of the pool, his eyes fixed on Rei as he prepared to dive in, his form perfect as ever.  
After spending the last few weeks teaching him to swim, Nagisa could barely contain his excitement as Rei successfully dived into the pool. "Ah, he's gotten so much better! Haru-chan, look! Look!"  
Haruka, of course, was to absorbed about getting back into the water to watch, but Nagisa was to absorbed to really notice.

Rei saw the middle line of the pool approach him as he strongly kicked through the momentum of his dive, but cursed himself when he realized he wouldn't he able to cross it before he needed to take a breath. Unlike freestyle and backstroke, when he came to the surface, Rei continued to use the dolphin kicks he had used after his dive. All the power in his arms was needed the preform the other half the stroke, Rei visualizing what Nagisa had described to him when he was being taught his now preferred stroke.  
_"It's like the layers of a pine tree! Small triangle, then bigger, and then large tree!"_  
While the visual had sounded like nonsense at first, he quickly formed the consecutive shapes down his front before, in the widest position, bringing both his arms back, stretching them to their limits as he pushed them out of the water and over and shoving him ahead.  
A part of him was always making sure to time the movement of his arms with the roll of his body to lend extra power to his kicks, but soon these thoughts were drowned out by more natural impulses; the strain building in his tiring arms, the need to breathe as he came up for frantic, ragged breaths with the lift of his arms.

The butterfly was by far the most physically exhausting of the four strokes, so that even in his athletic shape he had a hard time completing an easy two laps of the pool. At first, Rei had regarded it also as the most useless of the strokes; if one was stranded at sea, this would perhaps be the only stroke completely useless if you wanted any hope of somehow swimming to land. Yet, as he had seen Nagisa teach it to him, he had found a unique beauty in it; in its differences from the others, the perfectly regulated roll of the body, like a perfectly running machine. Even in his he tired, he motivated himself by thinking of the art it took to perfect the stroke he was doing, how beautiful he had become.

With these thoughts powering his mind, he made his last, gasping stroke as both his arms landed on the edge of the wall.


End file.
